How To Teach Your Kids To Read

As your little one grows up, you would need to start incorporating certain good practices in him/her. And reading happens to be one of those very important practices which would help your kid both academically and personally in the days to come.

Each kid has his/her own whims and fancies. And so when you start inculcating the practice of reading in your little one, you would need to be on the lookout for certain traits of his/her that you could use to your benefit. In addition to that, here are some simple tips that can help you out with the same.

Ways To Teach Your Kids To Read

The Look Matters

Remember how as a kid you used to hate all those bland books that had only words and no pictures? Well, your kids would probably feel the same way too. Children find it easier to associate with pictures, sounds and videos than words. Therefore, try to pick out books that contain plenty of colorful pictures and additional attractions like pop up descriptions which your kids would absolutely love.

Reading Aloud

Reading aloud would actually help your kids understand and learn to pronounce tough words. And it does not necessarily mean you need to keep on reading books with them.

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Rather, read aloud from anything you can get your hands on, say for example a magazine, cookbook or newspaper etc. In addition to generating an interest, this would actually prompt your kids to ask you for the meanings of certain words they find confusing, thereby improving their vocabulary.

Prompting Them To Read

As you read aloud to your children, make them join you. Stop at certain places and act as if you don’t know how to pronounce the word and let your kids take over from there. Join in again after some time to keep them interested.

Alternatively, you can build up the suspense of the story to a great extent and then leave the climax for later. If you made the story intriguing enough, your kids would most probably pick up the book after you have gone and continue reading.

Make Kids Read Together

Making your kids read together can help you teach both of them simultaneously. Accordingly, if you have an older kid who already knows to read a bit, ask him/her to join you when you read out to your younger kid.

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Ask him/her to take over at certain places and join in on the fun. Then when the younger one joins in, move aside for the siblings to continue reading and help them only in places where they get stuck.

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Change The Reading Material With Age

As your kid grows up, keep changing the reading material to suit his/her age. Accordingly, you can opt for fairy tales at the age of 5, comic books at the age of 7, newspaper clippings at the age of 10 and novels at the age of 15 etc.

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The internet is loaded with plenty of websites that teach kids to read, write, sing, and dance etc. So browse through a couple of good sites that offer reading practices to children and let your kids enjoy the interactive activities on the sites while making sure that they learn to read in the process.

Be Gentle, Not Persuasive

Reading needs to be fun not a chore that your kids would most probably start to abhor with your constant persuasion. Let them take the time to identify the material that they like to read and be generous enough to get them the kind of books they fancy (Not adult material though. You need to place a serious check on that). And as they progress, try introducing small snippets of alternate materials that they can try to read.

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Never force your children to give up what they like doing in order to read. Rather, set up a time schedule (mutual agreement) that would be beneficial for both. Accordingly, you can let him/her play his favorite video games or watch his favorite television channel if he/she reads a few pages every day. Restrictive measures will get you nowhere.